Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

davecl writes "The first images from the Herschel satellite have been released by ESA. The images are of the galaxy M51 and show a lot of structure and other features never seen before. Coverage of these results can be found on the ESA website and on the Herschel mission blog. There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance, but these very early results already show the promise of this mission. I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"

The maximum resolution of a telescope is proportional to the diameter of its objective (main lens or mirror), and inversely proportional to the wavelength at which it's observing. This is observing at wavelengths 100 times longer than the visible and near-IR instruments like Hubble observe, so it's at a 100x disadvantage coming out of the starting gate.

We've never had images anywhere near this good in this part of the spectrum. I'm very sorry that they offend you.

But you're right. We definitely shouldn't field any instruments until we're ready to deliver, power and support an array at Neptune's distance. After all, it's not like we learn anything from intermediate steps. Just look at all the money we wasted, wasted, on Hubble. Or Palomar. Or Galileo's first telescope. (After all, who needed to know that Jupiter had moons, or Saturn had rings?)

it makes me sad that this seems like frivolous spending in light of the social issues this planet is facing

Hey without this "frivolous spending" there may not be a society to have social issues. Science is about interpreting the physical world which we all depend on for our survival. You never know what improvements to our lives will come from the "frivolous spending". It may even save the planet itself.

Then get off your sorry ass and go out there and do something about these social issues. You're spending valuable time posting on Slashdot - time that could be well spent working on these issues. In fact, the resources you're using on your computer could be better spent towards fixing those social issues.

Start small - make yourself a model for others to follow. It's what Mother Theresa did, and she didn't waste her time on a technology site complaining that all the stuff they wrote about were frivolous. She

It's largely because of science that you can look at the problems we have today and consider them serious social issues. Rewind a thousand years and near-starvation was more or less the natural state of peasants everywhere, diseases routinely killed large fractions of the population everywhere, etc.

If you want to complain about frivolous spending complain about military spending which is not only of much greater magnitude than scientific expenditures, but also tends to create more problems than it solves.

One of the most serious social issues that we face is that people don't value knowledge and learning for its own sake. When the heights of human potential - at any part of the spectrum - are ignored, we all suffer.

We cannot solve social problems by retreating from our highest endeavors. The cost of the space program in the USA per family is the same as what it costs to see a movie. But military programs, inherently negative and wasteful, consume HALF of the federal income taxes paid. We ignore our social pr

Yes, they were taken with one of the main instruments, PACS. PACS has been switched on since shortly after launch. Yes, the cover was only just opened, but this was one of the objects they viewed shortly after the cover was opened. M51 was chosen because they could directly compare it with Spitzer Space telescope images taken at similar wavelengths.

I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"

Actually, we find your work to be subpar. Perhaps if you were not posting on slashdot, this telescope would not be the failed lemon that it is. Get back to work, and let's not hear back from you until we have some surface detail of Pluto.

The best theoretical resolution at 100 microns will be 7.2 arcseconds, limited by the size of the main mirror. Hubble can do 0.05 arcseconds at 0.5 microns (visible light). This may not seem all that impressive, but it about 4 times better than previous far-infrared observatories. And the instruments on-board are significantly more advanced than anything ever used for far-infrared astronomy.

Though I've looked around a bit, nobody seems to have pointed out something that appears quite interesting in those pictures.
The two arms of the galaxy take a sharp turn at mirror points. This seems to imply that the speed of rotation of the galaxy increased significantly suddenly. I'm no astronomer, but this seems important. Does anyone who knows more than me care to shed some light on the matter?

I'm doing that right now. Hope my batteries will keep up. Hard to keep it pointed in the right direction too. And since M51 is 31 million light-years distant, I am not sure we will be here to see the reflection when it hits us in 62 million years.

Bias settings for the detectors, calibration, temperatures for the various cooling elements... There's a whole lot of things that need to be sorted out in the commissioning and 'performance verification' phases, and this is what we're spending the time between now and the first full-scale science observations in mid-October.

Yes, pretty, because each new pixel added brings the human race more knowledge about the rest of the universe. But we need to put telescopes farther from Earth, such as above and below the elliptic plane of the solar system and far enough away so that the parallax is better than we get with that of the earth's orbit. Being further away from the Sun would also lower the temperature and noise floor, bringing increased sensitivity.